Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (22 page)

This was the waiting phase, where no one really expected to discover the smoking gun in the paperwork but they couldn’t in good conscience sit around doing nothing while they waited for the evidence guys to uncover something they could use. She had felt the odd one out on the techie side of the room, so she had dragged her chair over to where Zockinski and Hill were delving through reports. They hadn’t yet figured out how to get rid of her (she had followed them when they had attempted a strategic coffee run, smiling at them like a happy shark), so they had eventually given up and started passing her files.

She sighed and complained at the right times, but deep down, she was dancing. 

Rachel had gone ahead and outlined her theory of plans within plans to the detectives, who agreed with her but said it didn’t matter.  The bottom line was a woman was dead and a man might never walk again, and so what if Glazer had been forced to deviate? As long as they caught him, his plans weren’t any of their goddamned business.

To which she had replied: “Since when do we ignore motive?” and held up a little doodle she’d scribbled on a scrap of paper.
HELLO OACET, YOU’RE EARLY
in overlabored ballpoint, surrounded by a daisy chain and bunnies.

They had returned to the files to look for any connections between the victims and OACET, between the victims and technology, between the victims and… Nothing. But if they had been profiled for predictability, then nothing was to be expected. 

Jason had inadvertently hit on Glazer’s victimology in an impromptu lecture on the way back to the Station. The videos, Jason had said, were extremely well-done because Glazer had micromanaged the events leading up to them. He had profiled people who loved routine as that allowed him to build scenarios that hadn’t occurred around events that did. “But none of this matters, now” Jason said as he finished. “He’s done making videos. Getting the right setup to do this level of digital manipulation is a labor of love, but he fragged his box. He wouldn’t have done that if still he needed it.”

First store, then coffee shop, then bank...
Rachel slapped her pen against the back of her hand as she tried to see what they were missing.
HELLO OACET, YOU’RE EARLY.

It was ten at night. Frustration was setting in. Both Zockinski and Hill were running orange, a little bit of gray sneaking around their edges.

“Can we guess why Glazer would have an RFID scanner in his apartment? Maybe we can backtrack or…”
Order some more food,
she thought, staring wistfully at the empty pizza boxes in the corner. All three Agents were starving.

“Easiest way to ID someone,” Zockinski said. Hill went slightly puce, a color Rachel associated with a sigh, but didn’t look up from the report on his desk.

“Yeah, we know it’s an ID system, but why was it there? Why would he want to know who was in his apartment?”

“If he knew law enforcement would be there, he wanted the names of people involved in his case,” Zockinski said.

“That’s a lot of assumptions,” she said, counting on her fingers as she listed them off. “That the cops would find his place, that they’d be carrying RFID tags, that he’d still have a computer there to store data…”

“And that they wouldn’t have one of these,” Zockinski took out his well-worn wallet and smirked at her, smug in pinks. “Bet you can’t see through this.”

“American Express, Sam’s Club membership, transit card, Visa debit, and Discover,” she said, and his face and colors fell. Hill laughed without looking up.

“Nice Faraday cage,” she said, pointing at his wallet. “It’ll block most RFID readers, but…” she said as she tapped her head and winked at the big detective. “…this ain’t something you can buy off of eBay.”

Zockinski said nothing as he turned away and buried his wallet back in his pocket, but he had started to pick up a furious red.

Oh hell.
Rachel suddenly remembered how Hill had no problem following the discussion on RFID tags back when they were interviewing Burman. That, along with Hill’s refusal to engage in the current conversation, said plenty about Zockinski: the man was a privacy bug. Hill had probably listened to his partner complain about technological violations of personal privacy so often he could recite them from memory.
No wonder Zockinski can’t stand OACET,
she thought.
We’re a worst fear realized.

Before she could smooth over her mistake, Jason dropped himself on top of her files.

“Rachel’s wrong. Faraday cages are a gimmick,” Jason said, nudging aside a few loose pages and letting them slide out of order. “They might distort signals, but they can’t block signals unless they’re grounded. Glazer’s was a low-to-high frequency reader, and if he rigged up a signal boost to read a tag from five feet away, you can bet that thing’ll also bust through your wallet. “

“Pull up a seat, Jason,” she said in a tone that meant: Move.

He ignored her, so she said the same thing over the link, and he lunged for the nearest chair to get her out of his head.

Before he could reach it, the dry sound of Styrofoam sliding across the floor made the whole room shiver. Jason changed course and scrambled to get the packing materials from the new computers out of the path of the door, and Phil snuck in around the mess, apologizing.

“Hey, Santino?” Phil was carrying a small box which gave off the soft sounds of small metallic collisions when he tilted it. “There’s something you should see.”

He placed the box on the table and pulled out four long metal pins, wrapped with springs and set with a circular disk on the one end. Each was slightly different, with pieces of indiscriminate origin cobbled together to form similar wholes, and each was about the size of his palm.  He put them down one by one, and they rolled with the slope of the table in a fixed circle.

“Fuzes?” Hill asked, and raised an eyebrow to ask permission.

Phil nodded, and Hill picked one up with careful fingers. “I’ve been breaking down the four bombs with the tactics unit,” Phil said. “Sergeant Andrews brought in a specialist in military antiques to see if they have a historical antecedent. They seem to be custom, but he’s getting a second opinion just in case it’s obscure.

“So far,” he continued, “there’s nothing to link the bombs to any parts suppliers. They’re definitely handmade. Glazer could have gotten most of the pieces from hardware stores, old clocks, scrap bins… none of the individual components are especially unique. But look at this.”

He grabbed one of the fuzes by the long pin and flipped it over. “See that pattern on the back?”

“A star?” Rachel peered at it from her vantage point behind Zockinski, who quickly stepped to the side to make room for her at the table.

“Could be a star, could be a funky icon or initials,” Phil said. “But it’s on all of these. And it’s not an accidental tool mark. Glazer etched the design into the brass.”

“Hang on,” Santino said, his thumb flying across his phone’s screen.  “The reader has that same mark. It wasn’t etched, though. It was done in flux so I thought it was castoff from a sloppy solder.” He handed his phone to Hill, then turned to the bin where the innards of the RFID reader had been tagged and bagged to locate the original. 

Rachel plucked the image from his phone and held it clear in her mind, then joined Phil and Jason in the link to explore its nooks and crannies.

“Not a star,”
she said.
“More like a W in a fancy script.”

“Or one with an E across it,”
Jason said, and took the image from her to flip it sideways. Part of the pattern started to glow in OACET green.
“See how the bars intersect?”

“You’re right,”
Phil twisted the image again to test the alignment, and Rachel felt the feathered notion of motion sickness catch in her throat.

“Guys.”
Rachel held up her hands in surrender and dropped out of the link. She flipped her notepad over, and on the cardboard back she drew the W, then the E, and made sure to round the letters so they matched those on the metal.

The MPD officers dropped into to vivid reds and yellows as they realized they were after a madman courteous enough to sign his work.

“Are the prints in for Glazer’s place?” Zockinski asked Hill. Glazer had done a thorough job wiping down his apartment, but the forensics team had ripped the place apart and had put together full sets from three different people. No one ever thought to clean the lip on the underside of the toilet tank lid.

The tall man shook his head. “Not yet. If they belong to someone with a different name, these could be his initials.”

Santino burned bright blue as he scuffed his chair across the linoleum and grabbed his laptop. “It’s definitely his signature,” he muttered.  “Some maker out there knows him.”

“Maker?” Zockinski asked.

“There’s a huge subculture of do-it-yourselfers out there,” Santino said as he hunted and pecked at the keyboard with his right hand. “The active ones—the really good ones—they keep tabs on each other.” 

“If they know Glazer,” Zockinski said as he picked up a fuze and ran his little finger over the etching, “why do you think they’ll help you catch him?”

“Makers aren’t crazed anarchists.” Santino grinned without looking up. “They’re hobbyists. If they know him, they’ll come forward. And if he’s ever posted his craft online, someone out there will know him.” 

One of Santino’s many pet theories was that makers, especially tech junkies, were a cross between archivists and anthropologists, and had appointed themselves the record-keepers of the digital landscape. The tech junkies loved to track inventions originating off of the grid, as independents often created new technologies that were of greater interest to them than what they considered to be mass-produced trash. Glazer’s little RFID scanner was distinctive, and Santino was betting that a device so complex could not spring forth fully-formed from the brow of someone unfamiliar with technology. When he had uploaded the images of the scanner to makers’ communities, Santino had put out the online equivalent of an Internet-wide Amber Alert.

Now, with the signature from the fuzes, Santino hoped to draw in those makers from outside of the tech subset. “We just got lucky,” Santino said as he updated his earlier posts with images of Phil’s fuzes. “Analog and digital widens the field of people who might know him.” 

“How long will this take?” Hill asked. Behind him, Jason rolled his eyes.

“Watch yourself,”
she told him.

“…morons who don’t understand how the new world works…”
Jason muttered in her head.

“Or, persons with different abilities,”
she said, nudging him towards the Agents’ version of political correctness. She wasn’t sure whether Hill had a particular specialty or was just a darned solid cop, but out of all of the men in the room, he was the one she’d pick to stand beside her in a bar fight. She had met less reliable rocks.

Santino sent the last request off into cyberspace and slumped back in his seat. “If Glazer was an active maker, then we’ll know his history in ten minutes,” he said to Hill. “But I think it will take longer. Glazer probably stopped contributing to the community when he started to plan out his perfect crime. He needed to put some distance between his name and his product. Still, if he ever posted anything, someone will remember it. This handmade hardware is so unique it might as well be made out of his DNA. Someone out there knows him. Nerds are like elephants: we never forget.”

There was a knock on the door and Chief Sturtevant leaned in. “You’re over your twelve,” he said. Shift policies were structured to prevent officer fatigue, which set in after twelve hours; Rachel pinged the closest computer for the time and realized she had been trapped in her damned skinny suit for almost fourteen. “You’re off the clock. Go home.”

He shut the door and walked away, and Rachel promptly forgot about him until she realized Zockinski and Hill were packing up.

“You’re leaving?” Rachel found it hard to believe the two detectives kept the cop’s version of banker’s hours. 

“I’ve got kids,” Zockinski said as he grabbed his suit coat from the rack and disappeared.

“Like hell he does,” she said to Hill.

“Twins,” the large man said before he followed his partner into the hallway. “Two little girls. See you at six.”

“Did you know Zockinski’s got kids?” Rachel asked Santino. She was almost indignant; Zockinski should not be allowed to break out of the box she had made for him.

Santino nodded. “They’re adorable. His wife is smoking hot, too.”

“That’s just not right,” Rachel muttered.

“How are we going to handle transportation?” Phil asked Santino. Her partner had their only car and one usable arm. 

“Give me another ten minutes here to wrap up,” he said. “Some replies are starting to come in, and I want to manage my logoff.” 

“Okay,” Phil said, and left with Jason to grab a snack from the vending machine in the hall.

“What do you want?”
Phil asked her. 

“Anything king-sized,”
Rachel replied.
“If there aren’t any left, snack cakes.”
The prepackaged pastries tasted like gummed flour but they packed the most calories per punch. She could ride one of those until she got home and could make herself a proper meal.